THE

LIBERTARIAN

ENTERPRISE

Barring the People from the Land

Who could be against "protection"? Parents are expected to "protect"
their children. Everyone wants to "protect" a litter of helpless
puppies.

But the word can have other meanings. If the head of the household
has died and the property tax payments aren't being made, the
authorities may eventually decide to "protect the asset" on which
they have filed their liens. Such a gentle way to describe the
process of evicting the tearful widow and her kids, setting their
belongings on the public sidewalk, changing the locks and securing
the place with yellow police tape till auction day.

It's this latter use of the word "protect" we must keep in mind as we
read that U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell ruled June 25 in favor of
the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and the Sierra Club in their
suit against three counties in southern Utah, in a case concerning
county roads through the so-called Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument.

In the waning days of the late Clinton administration, the president
decided to override the objections of local states and counties --
paying off his supporters on the extreme fringes of the environmental
"protection" movement (as well as any supporters who might have
controlled, say, Indonesian coal deposits, hardly anxious to compete
with high-quality coal newly scheduled to be mined in southern Utah)
by waving his magic executive pen and declaring a great swatch of
southern Utah off limits for productive use ... possibly including
coal mining.

(You remember coal. We burn it to make electricity, and Utah's is
particularly hard and clean-burning. Try telling the residents of
California now suffering rotating power blackouts they're being
"protected" from the over-hasty development of Utah's coal reserves.)

At any rate, the three counties in question decided to make use of an
1866 federal law which provides them "the right of way for the
construction of highways across public lands not reserved for public
uses."

Congress repealed that law in 1976, but existing rights of way were
"grandfathered in" and thus still protected. So the Utah counties
went in and re-graded the roads they intended to keep open through
the new "monument," around which the green extremists now planned to
wrap the legal equivalent of yellow police tape -- "protecting" vast
acreages against any trespass or productive use by the people of the
United States.

In their lawsuit, the environmental groups contended the roads in
question were not protected under the law because they were not
actually "built"; did not access particular destinations, and in some
cases were on land already "reserved for a public use" ... coal
development, oddly enough. The counties responded that the roads were
important transportation links and had been in use since the 19th
century.

A federal court ruled in 1998 that the counties' maintenance of
rights of way would not constitute trespass onto federal lands, but
then stayed its decision pending a ruling by the Bureau of Land
Management on whether the rights of way were valid (an odd measure of
deference for an independent branch of government to show mere
appointed regulators.)

Not surprisingly, the green-infiltrated BLM concluded in 1999 that
with one exception, the right-of-way were not valid.

Judge Campbell's ruling now upholds the BLM's determination that the
counties did not have rights of way on 16 of 17 routes -- a precedent
which could affect control of tens of thousands of routes and trails
on public lands.

Thus are effectively barred the hunters, the shooters, the hikers,
the fishermen, the rock collectors, the off-roaders -- thus is the
human-hating agenda of the Green Extreme made flesh.

"No more will the counties be able to undermine the protection of
national parks, Bureau of Land Management lands and wildlife refuges
with the blunt edge of the bulldozer," crows Heidi McIntosh, an
attorney and "conservation director" for the Southern Utah Wilderness
Alliance ... using that interesting word "protection," again.

Significantly, Judge Campbell said the goal of Congress in repealing
the 1866 law, "that federal lands be governed in accordance with
national interest, would be undermined if the interest of the various
states, rather than the interest of the federal government, governed
the validity."

In fact, the only way the federal government is authorized by the
Constitution to control any lands within the several states is to
"purchase by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the
Same shall be, (places) for the Erection of Forts, Magazines,
Arsenals, dock-Yards and other needful Buildings."

Has the Utah state Legislature consented to sell the federal
government this "Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument"? Does
the federal government need all this land for "Forts" and
"dock-Yards"? Has the federal government, in fact, ever attempted to
buy this land from the state? How much did it offer? Cash or check?

Judge Campbell here vacates, violates, and eviscerates the 10th
Amendment (an integral part of the Constitution which she has sworn
an oath to protect and defend) -- the amendment which informs us that
in fact it is the powers and prerogatives of the states -- not the
sharply limited interests of the central government -- which must
take precedence, since "The powers not delegated to the United States
by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved
to state states respectively, or to the people."

Of course, Judge Campbell is not the first federal functionary
cynical enough to look at the return address on her paychecks and
promptly turn this vital "default setting" of the constitution upside
down.